


as deep as the pacific ocean

by simplyclockwork



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Blatant homophobic language, Canon Compliant, Canon compliant up to the end of season 4, Gift Fic, Homophobia, John Has Issues, John Watson Loves Sherlock Holmes, John is closeted, Johnlock - Freeform, M/M, Mentions of Child Abuse (past), PTSD, Past Child Abuse, Post-Season/Series 04, Sad, Self-Loathing, Sherlock loves John Watson, Suicidal Ideation, prompt, read the tags!!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-28
Updated: 2020-02-28
Packaged: 2021-02-27 21:08:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 8,487
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22932289
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/simplyclockwork/pseuds/simplyclockwork
Summary: Sherlock finally admits his feelings to John, but it doesn't go as hoped. At the risk of losing their friendship, John battles with his own inner demons as they try to find their way back together.
Relationships: Sherlock Holmes/John Watson
Comments: 64
Kudos: 209





	1. Soldiers

**Author's Note:**

  * For [AnneCumberbatch](https://archiveofourown.org/users/AnneCumberbatch/gifts).



> A gift fic for @annecumberbatch. 
> 
> This fic had the potential to be much longer, but I didn't want to make Annie wait, so hopefully it doesn't feel like I ended it too soon.
> 
>  **Prompt:**
> 
> _Angst, pining, miscommunication, internal angst_
> 
> _“John’s struggling with his feelings for Sherlock, but there’s a ton of homophobic pressure surrounding him, and Sherlock doesn’t know that John gets mocked for it all the time.”_
> 
> _“Sherlock, ideally, would have feelings [for John] and be mad he won’t reciprocate because he has no idea that John’s being terrorized”_
> 
> ——
> 
> Fic title from _Wanna Be Yours_ by **Arctic Monkeys**
> 
> _hold your hair in deep devotion (how deep?)  
>  at least as deep as the Pacific Ocean  
> I wanna be yours_
> 
> _secrets I have held in my heart  
>  are harder to hide than I thought  
> maybe I just wanna be yours_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is a different writing style than I usually do, so I hope it's not awful

Discrimination and homophobia are nothing new for John. What started as off-hand comments from his father, comments that grew into definitive, hateful statements once Harry came out, have shifted into peer-based judgements and social discourse. All of which have done nothing but push him deeper into the metaphorical closet. Into hiding himself, repressing a part of who he is, leaving him battered and internally high-strung.

There is a lot of rage inside John Watson, and much of it comes from internalized self-hatred; his own father’s voice echoing slurs and loathing that he carries next to his heart. It aches in his chest, batters at the edges of his head, and sinks putrid teeth deep into his spine.

When John meets Sherlock Holmes and feels a twinge of something for him, something beyond the simple recognition of a friend, that angry beast in his chest batters and bites. Turns inward and makes John want to cave in on himself. No matter how he tries, how he denies the claims of those in their lives, John cannot seem to divert the snide comments and side-eyed looks. Angelo brings them a candle for the table. Mrs. Hudson already thinks they should share a bed—probably assumes that they do. Even Mycroft asks John if he should expect a ‘happy announcement,’ simply because John is a loyal man.

John is a soldier. A man of war. Built upon solid loyalty and honour, even if his foundations quake with jagged, uneven, bone-deep self-hatred and repressed personhood. He is a soldier down to his core, and Sherlock Holmes saved his life. So, yes, he _is_ loyal, and very early, almost immediately. It is his way, and he cannot be anything else, anyone else. Not when his entire existence struggles not to fly apart into shattered fragments.

John soldiers on, holds himself tightly together, high-strung and on edge, and he tells himself he can’t love Sherlock. Because Sherlock is a man, and he, John Watson, is _most certainly not gay_. He cannot be gay, he simply _cannot,_ because if he were, his entire life would stop, caught on its axis, and that is not an option. It really isn’t.

Years and years into their friendship, John finds himself across the kitchen table from a madman, and his thoughts are torn, just as they always are. Part of his mind is on his daughter, babbling happily on his knee, stuffed bee toy clutched in one chubby hand. The other is on Sherlock, staring at him with expectant, eager hope.

Still another—a very tiny sliver, but one that never ceases to prod and stab—is focused upon the incredible strength it takes to hold himself in check. To deny the warmth burning in John’s stomach from the sight of those pale eyes on him, the undivided attention of an incandescent genius.

“What?” John says, asking for repetition. He heard Sherlock just fine, knows what he said, the words burned into his skin. But John asks him to repeat himself anyways, to buy time. Seems he is always buying time. Stretching out the moments. Equally terrified and engrossed by the man who has become his best friend, and tragically almost, not-quite life partner—but not _that_ way, never _that_ way, no.

“I _said_ ,” Sherlock begins, voice edged hard despite the note of hope weaving through. “I think you should move back to Baker Street.”

“Right.” Rosie babbles in John’s lap, a loud, squealing cry of joy slipping from her lips, filling the space between them, bringing a small smile to Sherlock’s face. The sight makes John’s heart leap and his stomach twist into furious knots, and he sucks air in through his nose like a man on the cusp of drowning. “Right,” he says again, because what else is there to say?

Sherlock stares at him, brows drawing up, then down, his mouth twisting.

“Unless you’d rather not.”

John aims his eyes at the table. Burns his gaze into it, wishes he could burst into flames and disappear from the world, even for just a day. Hell, even a moment would be great—one where he doesn’t have to constantly war against the battle inside him. He bites into his bottom lip, bounces Rosie on his knee, and looks back to Sherlock.

“Not sure that’s a good idea, Sherlock,” he says and tries to tell himself that he doesn’t speak the name like a prayer. That his tongue doesn’t wrap around the syllables like that of a lover. Even in his head, he’s not very convincing.

“And why not?” Sherlock is demanding, angry, piqued. Hurt. John closes his eyes to shut it out, but it doesn’t work. Never really does, not when Sherlock’s face is imprinted on the insides of his eyelids, permanent and stain-like.

“Well, for one—there’s not really enough space, is there?” John opens his eyes, gesturing with a free hand around the cluttered kitchen, the messy sitting room, one arm cradling his daughter close. “There are only two bedrooms. While I’d be fine to share with Rosie for now, she will need her own space eventually.” John shakes his head. Digs a nail into the tabletop and half-closes his eyes. “No, Sherlock, it wouldn’t quite work.”

There’s a silence then, with Sherlock wiggling in his chair, uncomfortable. When John looks up at him, he notices the grey at the detective’s temples, the stern, vulnerable tilt of his mouth.

“We can always move to a larger place, but…” Sherlock holds up a hand when John opens his mouth. “Let me finish, John.” There is a note of something in his voice, something tremulous and rough, and John bites down on his tongue, imagining the taste of blood, and how it might feel to burn alive.

Because he is pretty sure this is it—that Sherlock is going to say them, the incendiary words that will set him alight, and blacken his flesh down to the very bone. He swallows around the ache in his chest and waits.

Sherlock licks his lips and speaks the words, and John knows it is the end.

“We could move into a larger place. But—and I was rather hoping we could finally have this conversation now—I don’t think that’s necessary.”

John holds his daughter to his chest and stares at the floor. He can feel the growling in his ribcage, the self-loathing, and he begins to feel he has fallen beneath an undertow. He is drowning. Sitting here, in the kitchen at Baker Street, across from Sherlock with his daughter on his knee, John is drowning.

Sherlock goes on, and John wishes he would stop because he can’t—he _can’t do this_ , and yet, here it comes.

“John, I think we have danced around this long enough.” Sherlock’s words slam into his chest, because, yes, they have. They really have. He knows this, and he knows it is necessary. Because he, John Watson, really has no other choice. His left hand curls into a fist, nails digging into flesh, and Rosie wiggles in his lap, suddenly restless. She can feel it, his anxiety, his ever-present anger. John forces his hand loose, playing with her blonde curls.

The man across the table is looking at him with eyes like physical knives, and John sinks his teeth against the inside of his cheeks.

“John, before I… left,” Sherlock pauses, leaving the understatement of the year to hang in the air. As if his two years away were just a holiday, and not the culmination of everything that tore them apart, all those years ago. “We were—we were good together.” Sherlock looks at John with a desperation he can feel echoed inside his own chest, and John can’t even meet his eyes. Sherlock goes on, his voice a little lower, a little weaker. “When I came back, there was so much. _So much_ that kept us apart. Mary, my lies and suicide, the terrorist attack. Magnussen. My drug use. Mary’s death.” His face darkens, enough that John can feel it across the table. “ _Eurus_.” Sherlock’s hands smooth over the tabletop, and John steels himself for the blow. “John—in all that time, in all that cataclysmic chaos, you were the one constant. Even when… even when we were apart, even in the morgue, with Culverton—” Sherlock shakes his head with enough force that his curls shiver against his forehead.

John won’t meet his eyes, he won’t. He can’t. He knows what is coming, and he can’t look at Sherlock when he says the words, because then they will be real, and Sherlock will know that he feels them, too. John stares at a curly ringlet on the top of Rosie’s head, letting Sherlock’s low, fervent voice wash over him.

“John, you are, and always have been, a constant in my life. Since the day we met. What I said at your wedding, that you always keep me right—it was the truest statement of my life.” Sherlock reaches out, grabbing at John’s hand, holding tight when John tries to wrench it away. There is little strength in the attempt, and they both know it, so John lets Sherlock grasp him by the fingers, palm shaking, and he stares at that curl in Rosie’s hair.

“You keep me right, John Watson, and I want—no, I _need_ you in my life.”

Sherlock’s soft voice is a dagger, an entire army of sharp blades, ripping into John’s chest.

“Sherlock—” he begins, broken, jagged, but Sherlock speaks over him.

“It’s been long enough, John,” the detective says, resolute. John can only cling to his daughter, a shield based in his heteronormativity, his concluded life with Mary, and listen. Listen to the oncoming rumble of a train wreck, and know it will destroy them both. Not him and Rosie, but him and Sherlock. He waits, and he listens, and he crumbles inside.

Sherlock is going on, words rushing out in clumsy bursts, tripping over his tongue in his desperation to reach John. He must feel it, too. How can he not? John is ripping them apart, just as he has ripped himself into pieces, and surely it is impossible for Sherlock not to feel it.

“John, I want you to move back to Baker Street, and I want us to be…together.” When John raises his head, Sherlock’s chin is jutting out, his spine hard, hands fisted on the tabletop. Only his eyes show the vulnerability beneath the bravado, the gaping, yawning chasm of hope behind the firm words of his speech.

John looks away, feeling his own chasm rip through his chest.

“Sherlock, I can’t.” His voice is low and just as empty as the space around his heart. “I can’t.”

Sherlock’s body goes rigid, turns to stone, eyes fixed on John’s blank face. Then, all at once and with absolute defeat, his shoulders slump, head dropping, eyes sliding closed with the wince of physical pain. John wants to look away, but he can’t. He owes Sherlock, owes him this one thing. If he is going to rip out his heart and stomp on it, the least he can do is look at the wreck, and understand.

This is his penance, his unavoidable Hail Mary confessional, and John will not look away. He feels small. Miserable. Worse than that. John feels like the worst kind of person, less than a human being, closing the door on both of them. Of them, together.

But what choice does he have? What other possible option? Nothing, there’s nothing else.

“Of course, John.”

John shakes, squirms, hears the heaviest weight attached to the final syllables of his name. Rosie tilts her head back, peering up at her father, round eyes fixed on his face. Her lower lip trembles and John soothes her with a gentle squeeze.

“I’m sorry, Sherlock,” he says, and gives the child another comforting embrace, wishing he could offer the same to Sherlock. But he can’t, because then it would be game over, and he cannot afford to lose. Not here, not now, when Sherlock’s obvious pain threatens to crumble his tenuous resolve. “I really am.”

“It’s fine,” Sherlock replies, and his head is still turned away, his mouth a thin, hard line around the agony he tries to hold back. But it’s not fine. Nothing is fine, never will _ever_ be fine, and, just as John had hoped to burn alive before, he now wishes he could fade into the very air between them, fraught and heavy with emotional destruction.

John’s watch dings an alarm into the room, making everyone jump, including Rosie. He silences the noise, lifting Rosie against his side as he stands.

“I have to go,” he says, looking at the top of Sherlock’s bent head with desperate eyes. “Work.” He hesitates, wipes the back of a hand against his mouth. “I—do you want me to bring her to Mrs. Hudson? It—it’s fine if you’re not up to—”

“No,” Sherlock interrupts, standing. His face is almost a mask, but it’s partial and piecemeal, broken in places and smooth in others. His eyes have gone dark, a rattling pain vibrating deep in their slate depths. He holds his arms out, and his hands tremble. “Give her to me. I will watch her until your shift is over.”

John hands him his daughter, giving her over to Sherlock’s capable arms. Their fingers brush, his child curling into Sherlock’s chest like they are one entity, and John feels sick.

“I’ll see you later,” he says, and he can’t be sure if he is talking to Sherlock, to Rosie, or to both. Bile rises in his throat, and he wishes he were dead.

Sherlock nods, silent, cradling Rosie to his chest. She blinks slowly, wide blue eyes slipping closer to shut, cheek pillowed on Sherlock’s collar bone. John envies her, envies them both.

“Okay.” John turns away, rips himself from the domestic scene, and grabs his messenger bag. He wants to look, to whirl and scream that it doesn’t matter, that what everyone says, what his father says, doesn’t matter. That he loves him, loves the madman, and wants him as much as Sherlock seems to want him.

Instead, he swallows the stomach acid burning at the base of his throat, and he leaves. John throws a tight smile to Mrs. Hudson downstairs, mutters something about not being late for work, and escapes out to the street.

Sliding into the back of a cab, he grits his teeth together and tries not to hyperventilate, throw up, or bleed out the pain in his chest from his mouth.

xxx

Sherlock is left with an acrid burn in his mouth and a sleeping child in his arms. When he presses his nose to Rosie’s head, she smells like warmth. Like sunlight made corporeal, like John, and his stomach clenches into a tight, heavy knot.

After crumbling, no longer turned to stone, he settles Rosie down for a nap. Stares at the cast of early morning sun on her golden curls and resists the urge to fly apart. 

There is a weight to the air, like destruction has come and gone, leaving nothing but devastation in its wake. Sherlock swallows down jagged edges and makes his quiet way back downstairs. 

Tea. John always makes tea in moments like these. His heart threatens to dissolve, and Sherlock stands over the kettle until it screams. He grabs at it with clumsy hands, shaking, everything shaking. His entire foundation is shattered, deconstructed, laid to ruin and dust. 

John said no. 

Said he can’t.

No.

Sherlock stirs sugar into his tea. The black maw of the drink stares up at him, very much like a gaping hole, and he finds himself reaching for the cream. It’s not how he takes it, nothing here is how he wants it to be, and he stirs the white into the dark, watching the cloudy cast swirl into the murky tea until it is a dirty brown. 

He sets it aside, feeling he might be ill. 

John said no.

He can’t.

Can’t. No. 

Sherlock grabs a handful of curls, and the faint echo of the gunshot wound in his chest stutters, his heart pulled along with it. Off-beat, off-putting, off-kilter. 

He wants to be sick. Feels a gag rise in his throat, but it is an empty choke, all noise and nothing more. In the end, he lets himself sink to the floor, arms around his waist. Feels like a lovelorn teenage boy again, chasing after the wrong kind of people, right until it led him into the arms of another type of lover altogether. One made of vein-rushing highs and sharp needle points. 

Rosie makes soft noises in her sleep, drifting through 221B via the baby monitor, and Sherlock lets it go. Everything slips away, leaving him staring at the floor, the kitchen cupboards hard against his spine. 

He’s not as young as he once was, and there’s a child upstairs. He really can’t fall down that hole again. Not now. Not when John said no, that he can’t. Maybe that’s why John doesn’t want Sherlock. Maybe John doesn’t want a used-up drug addict with pain in his skin and regret in his mouth. He’s a father now, after all. John can’t be expected to look after Sherlock anymore, to clean up his perpetual messes, his ugly fits of destruction.

Can’t be expected to want the damaged man Sherlock has always been.

Rosie starts to stir, soft noises of wakefulness over the monitor, the morning already stretching into noon. Time passing him by, without notice. Sherlock picks himself up off the floor, straightens his shirt, and sets his shoulders. 

Soldiers. John said that to him, once, when Eurus ripped something from him. _Today we have to be soldiers._ Sherlock had said words that day, three words he hadn’t meant, not in that way, not to that person. Words he had not tried to speak again until today when John said no, said he can’t.

Striding up the stairs to the second floor, Rosie’s little gurgling noises drifting through the open door, Sherlock grips the banister. Makes it a lifeline. 

_Soldiers._

xxx

The day passes in a blur of runny noses and stomach aches. Runny noses and cold symptoms for his patients, aching, roiling stomach aches for John. He bears down, digs deep, tries to focus. 

It’s useless, and his mind drifts like something caught on the wind, ripped away from view before he can catch it in his empty hands. Staring at his phone, he wills it to buzz. To ring. To jitter across the desk and shatter on the floor. Anything to break the silence, drawing out as the day stretches long.

“Thanks for coming in today, John.”

The voice rips him from his thoughts, and John looks up from a stack of patient charts to find a man standing over him. Andrew, a coworker, vaguely an acquaintance, and the clinic’s admin manager.

“No problem,” John says, and almost believes himself.

As if. _Everything_ is a problem, and John is the biggest one of all. Andrew doesn’t seem to notice the self-hatred dripping from John’s pores, and he offers a small smile.

“Really appreciate it—last-minute sick calls are always a pain.” Andrew sighs, brushing a stressed hand through his short brown hair. “Can’t imagine it’s easy for you, what with being a single dad—dropping everything to come in.” 

John’s mouth quirks into a thin line, blade sharp, almost sharper than the thing tearing through his chest at the memory of this morning. 

“Luckily, Sherlock was available today.” He tilts his head, notes something on a chart. “Rosie is with him.”

There’s a silence, stretching through the room, humming around jars of cotton balls, boxes of band-aids, cups filled with tongue depressors. John looks up, finds Andrew frowning. 

“That’s still going on, huh?” he asks, and John swallows the taste of bile. Andrew is looking at him with something like barely disguised disgust, and John wishes he could sink into the floor.

“Uh, I don’t—”

“I thought you were married,” Andrew interrupts, eyes squinting. “To a _woman_.” 

John sits back in his chair, limbs loose with an almost expectant shock. Right. Of course.

“Was,” he says, weakly. “She—died. Almost a year ago.” 

Andrew’s mouth goes tight at the corners, disapproval sharp in his eyes. “So, you’re back with _him_?” 

Digging his hands into the edge of the desk, John stares at the faded wood and feels his chest cave in, his stomach fall away. 

_Oh,_ he thinks. _Oh, god._

“I—it’s not like that,” he murmurs, knuckles turning white. “Sherlock and I—we’re not—it’s not—” His distress is palpable. His words from earlier, sitting across a different table from a very distraught Sherlock, echo in his head, in the air.

_I can’t. I can’t._

And here is why. 

When he looks up, Andrew has a horrified expression on his face. His hands rise, almost defensive. John thinks there must be something in his eyes, something dark and ugly, a reflection of the self-directed hatred ripping through his chest, but Andrew speaks, and John is wrong.

“Sorry, mate—jeez, I’m sorry.” Andrew’s cheeks are red, flushed, his eyes shifting away. “I shouldn’t have assumed you were, you know… _gay.”_ He says the word like it’s a curse, something dirty. John shivers. Releasing the edge of the desk, he digs his knuckles against his thighs, swallows down the taste of fire and brimstone. Making himself look up, look at the embarrassed, hate-filled man in front of him, John forces a smile on his paralyzed face.

He needs this job. He really does. 

“No worries,” John says, swallowing over and over around the self-loathing lodged in his throat. “All good.”

Andrew looks relieved, and John hates him for it. Because nothing is good, this is not good, _John_ is not good, and, when the admin manager hustles away, John wants to rip his skin off. 

He drags his phone from his pocket, staring at the blank screen and willing the last fifteen minutes to disappear from time. But they don’t, and the phone is still silent, and John wants to throw it against the wall, followed by his own spine. His useless, weak, pathetic spine. 

His fingers tap out a text, almost numb, and the words are so pitiful, so far from what he wants to write, that he feels another wave of nausea deep in his stomach. 

**How is Rosie doing? JW**

John sends the text, signs his name as if Sherlock won’t know who it is sending the message. But it’s all he can do because otherwise, he would write something else, something more profound. Something like _I’m sorry, you were right, I’m sorry, I can, I want to, god, Sherlock, I love you._

But he doesn’t write any of that. Not a single word of it, and his message sits, unread and unanswered until another patient is ushered into the room, and John goes through motions. Robotic, all easy bedside manner, his chest caving in as he prescribes cold medication and talks about consistent handwashing. 

When he checks his phone at the end of the day, there is a reply, and, where he thought he might feel hope, there is only something small and leaden inside his mouth.

_Fine. SH_

Pausing, fingers hovering over the screen, John imagines what it would be like to actually be authentic—to, for once in his life, say what he wants, what he means. Andrew’s voice echoes in his head— _you know,_ gay _—_ like a sickness, and John forces his misplaced hope aside.

**Glad to hear. Did she nap?**

The answer comes quickly, and John swallows hard.

_Yes. And ate. She is with Mrs. Hudson now, if you don’t mind picking her up from there. I have to go out. Last-minute case. SH_

John reads the words beneath the reply. Sherlock does not extend an invitation. Perhaps Mrs. Hudson isn’t free to watch Rosie all night. Maybe Molly is unavailable. 

Maybe Sherlock doesn’t want him there.

**Okay.**

xxx

Stepping out of a cab in front of 221B, John’s eyes are drawn to the upstairs window. Inexorable. Tethered. He balls his hands into fists and pushes through the front door. 

He looks up the stairs, and his entire body _wants_ , and he finds his foot on the bottom step before he can stop and think. Catching himself, John shakes his head, dismounting and nearly biting through his bottom lip. 

Sherlock’s not home. Even if he were, John would not be welcome, and that is no one’s fault but his own. This isn’t his home anymore—he doesn’t belong here, and Sherlock’s face across the table this morning shouldn’t make that feel like a surprise. But it does, and John has to tear himself away, forcing his feet toward the door marked _221A_.

He knocks, and Mrs. Hudson answers with an armful of sleepy toddler. Rosie shifts into her father’s arms without fuss, worming against John’s chest in search of heat, her bright blue eyes sliding shut. John looks at her, finds a mirror of himself, and wishes for a simpler life.

“Tea?” Mrs. Hudson asks, breaking into his thoughts, scattering them into the corners with the dust and the darkness. John pastes a smile on his face. 

“No, I better get Rosie home. I need to—” his words die in his throat, trapped, choking, and his head tilts upward. Mrs. Hudson sighs because they both heard it: a footstep, upstairs. The quiet stumble over a rucked carpet, and silence. Silence filled with someone silently cursing. 

John looks back at Mrs. Hudson, and she won’t meet his eyes. 

“Right,” John says, cradling Rosie’s head to his shoulder, looking for something to tether himself, because it feels like he might fly apart at any second. “Right.” He’s repeating, not saying anything, not really, because the words are trapped in his chest. The ones he should have said and didn’t. The ones not even Ella could pry from him. The ones he denied Sherlock across a table, in a kitchen painted with wan sunlight, and John turns on his heel and strides to the door. 

Sherlock is home, just above. He lied to John, avoided him and gave his daughter to Mrs. Hudson, and even her kindness has limits. Here and now, she has shown where her loyalty lies, and it is not with John, not in this.

John can’t even blame her. 

His daughter tucked against his chest, John flags a cab and tries not to look up before sliding in. But he does, and he catches him, catches Sherlock with his hand pressed to the glass pane of an upstairs window. John looks at him, Sherlock looking back, not even trying to hide. And why should he, when John is doing enough hiding for both of them? Sherlock laid his cards on the table, and John pushed them onto the floor, and now he really has no right to judge.

John slides into the cab, and the vehicle pulls away from the curb, leaving Baker Street behind. 


	2. Radio Silence

_Radio silence._ An unbearable term. Something based in military lingo, burned into John’s body by a bullet and years spent beneath a cruel desert sun, now made into a torture he cannot stand. 

John’s phone is silent and dark in his hand, and he wants to crush it, but if he does, that’ll destroy one last tenuous connection. It’s not one he deserves, he hasn’t earned this potential to reach out, but he can’t let it go. 

He can’t let it go.

John hasn’t heard from Sherlock in almost two weeks. No invitations to crime scenes. No spontaneous movie nights with Rosie dozing in Sherlock’s lap, Sherlock’s cold, bare toes tucked beneath John’s thigh on the sofa. Nothing.

Radio silence. 

Standing at the kitchen sink, a sponge in one hand and a soapy dish in the other, John stares out the window and tries not to think about it. His daughter babbles behind him, banging her hands on the plastic tray of her highchair, and John tries not to think about it.

Radio silence.

This is worse than when he thought Sherlock was dead. Two years of grieving and John actually wishes for that over the here and now. At least then, during those endless years, when he wanted to talk to Sherlock, he _knew_ he couldn’t. Knew there would be no reply because Sherlock was gone, and John thought he was dead. Buried beneath the soft earth, leaving behind nothing but a gravestone and a dusty flat.

Now, it’s so much worse because Sherlock is not dead. He is here, in London. A cab-ride away. Thirty minutes, maybe twenty-five, if there’s no traffic. 

It’s 7am, there’s no traffic, and Sherlock is a lifetime away. 

Radio silence.

John puts the dish in the sink, realizes the water has gone cold and drops the sponge in after. Rosie lets out a loud, shrieking cry, and John jerks, ripped from his thoughts by the noise. He turns to lift the child from her seat, and she grabs at his face and nose, babbling her limited words into his weak smile.

“Ba,” she says, gripping that small stuffed bee in one chubby hand.

“Dada,” she says, shoving her face against his.

“Sh’lock,” she attempts, and John wants to throw himself in front of a bus. 

“Nah, love,” he murmurs, smoothing a hand over her downy hair. “Not today. No Sherlock today.” 

Rosie’s little pink bud of a mouth pushes out in a distinct pout, and John feels a black wave rise over his head. She pouts enough to give the madman himself a run for his money, and the very thought makes his stomach turn.

“S’lock,” she repeats, a little less defined this time, almost a question, missing the ‘sh’ sound. John gets it anyway. He always gets it. Like father like daughter, both of them caught spinning on the axis of Sherlock Holmes. 

Rosie looks at him with wide, sombre eyes, and she presses a grubby palm to John’s cheek. He closes his eyes, tight, squeezing, his face twisted. It feels like she knows. Even a toddler knows, even his own daughter can see it, how he has messed everything up, and John hates himself. He always hates himself, but this is a new low because Rosie doesn’t deserve to feel this way. 

Balancing the child on his hip, rocking her until she giggles and hugs the stuffed bee to her chest, John reaches for his phone. It is heavy and cold in his hand and silent. He sends a text before he can talk himself out of it. Because Rosie needs Sherlock. 

Because _John_ needs Sherlock. Even if he can’t let himself need him the way he wants to, the way he _aches_ and _burns_ to, John can do this. He has to. If he doesn’t, it may as well be those two years all over again: Sherlock replaced by a black and silver tombstone, and endless days of regret for John.

**Rosie misses you.**

There’s more to it than that, of course there is. John misses Sherlock—misses him like a lost limb, like a piece of his own body has been torn away. But he can’t say that, can’t put it into words, because then the game will be over, and he will have lost. They both will have failed. 

John waits, seconds stretching into minutes, into an hour, until his back feels stiff from sitting. Rosie whacks him on the shoulder, and John comes to life, swooping her up into the air with laughter pouring from her open mouth.

He never wanted to be a dad, not really—never really thought of it. First, there was Afghanistan and a bullet in his body. Then there was the blackness, the sinking, oily pull of depression. And Sherlock, like a beacon, his personal lighthouse. The thrill of the chase, The Game, The Work. No time for much else. Even dating fell to the wayside. 

Then Sherlock’s ‘suicide,’ two years of silence, and picking up the pieces. Finding himself, with Mary’s help, pulling himself together just in time for Sherlock to come back and tear it all down.

The bonfire. The wedding. The surprise of the pregnancy, a sudden chance at something John had never planned for. Magnussen and Sherlock with a bullet in his chest, Mary’s death, Sherlock’s drug use. Eurus. 

Radio silence. 

Holding Rosie to his chest, John is glad to have something. Someone to tether him here, to stop him from flying off his axis, into the black dog of an empty life, the one that yawned around him before Sherlock came into his life. 

There is applesauce smeared all over Rosie’s face. John grins and tickles her sides, whisking her off to the bathtub with silly noises, childish laughter filling the empty spaces of the flat. 

His phone sits on the kitchen table, silent and dark, and John helps Rosie make a mess splashing bathwater onto the floor. He tries not to think of the quiet flat and the ghosts in the corners.

Radio silence. 

xxx

John’s text is a punch in the gut, a knife in his chest, an ache beside the echoing scar of a silenced bullet in his sternum. 

_Rosie misses you._ Not _I miss you_. Rosie. Sherlock misses her, too, of course he does. He misses an entire world of things, slipped from between his fingers like loose sand, and the ache of it makes his teeth grind together, loud in his rattling head. 

Sherlock shoves the phone under the couch, and returns to his hands and knees, digging through cold cases on the floor, laying the photos out against the red backdrop of the sitting room carpet. The images and cold, hard facts before him are grounding. A tether to the here and now, the possibility of answers. 

John’s message, John himself, leaves nothing but questions, and Sherlock is not about to reach blindly into that Pandora’s Box. He’s no idiot, and he isn’t about to act like it. It took everything for him to say what he’d said to John, two weeks ago in the kitchen. Every ounce of humanity he has managed to dredge up and hold onto, no longer the sociopath. All for nothing.

John doesn’t want him, and, at this point, Sherlock doesn’t even want himself. Not like this, the person he’s become. 

He stares at the grotesque images before him and prays for the man he used to be. The man who wouldn’t be so wounded, dragged down to earth by _emotions_ , by _sentiment._ By John Watson and his blasted, _I can’t._

Sherlock grinds a fist against the carpet and bites his tongue until it bleeds. 

John hadn’t even given him a reason. An explanation. He had just sat there, letting Sherlock dissolve, and he hadn’t even said _why._

_I can’t._

_Won’t,_ more like. 

Screw John Watson, and screw his daughter, innocent as she may be. Screw his _I can’t,_ and his _won’t,_ and his entire stained presence on Sherlock’s psyche. 

With one harsh sweep of his hand, Sherlock scatters the photos, all his careful organization, and spits blood into his palm. When he sits back against the edge of the sofa, it is with slumped shoulders and a curving spine, and it is with the taste of metal and regret in his mouth. 

The day dwindles into night, and Sherlock watches the sunlight move over the floor, pressing out through the windows when the sun sinks beneath the horizon. The blood dries in his palm, filling creases in the skin. Sherlock hugs his legs to his chest, thinks about tea, and doesn’t move.

xxx

There’s a beauty in silence, Sherlock thinks, watching his phone ring in his hand. A beauty too easily shattered by the discordant noise of a ringtone. 

It’s been five days since John’s text, that inane sentence about his daughter missing Sherlock. Almost twenty days since John walked away from him, leaving Sherlock at the kitchen table with a handful of empty gestures and a mouth full of bitter regret. 

Sherlock’s phone rings and rings, and he stares at it, making no effort to answer. Why should he? John has already said everything he needs to say. What else could possibly be left?

His hand moves of its own accord, fingers closing around the device just as it falls silent. Tilting the screen toward his face, Sherlock sees the voicemail banner. He looks at it and looks at it, and the silence rushes in to fill the empty spaces in his chest.

A knock at the door shatters it again, rips it anew, and Sherlock wonders what the point of silence is when it can be so easily broken. He waits, listens to another knock, and remembers Mrs. Hudson is out of town. Unfolding his long legs, he moves across the flat, down the stairs, opening the door to find John there, a desperate silhouette against grey London skies.

“Sherlock,” he says, and there’s an entire world in that name, one Sherlock really doesn’t want to look at too closely. He takes a step back, still holding onto the door, trying to make space.

“What?” he asks, and John’s face crumples. Only for a moment, before steel slots into place, the soldier standing before him. 

“I need you to take Rosie,” John tells him, and Sherlock looks down, noticing for the first time that an unsteady toddler is gripping John’s pant leg. Rosie blinks up at him, blue eyes like John’s, yet infinitely easier to read. When he turns his gaze back to John, he is speaking. “I have to go—I was called in, and I can’t get a babysitter. Molly is working a double, and Mrs. Hudson is away. I—please, I need—”

“It’s fine.” Sherlock’s voice interrupts like a roll of thunder, darker and heavier than storm clouds. He reaches out, taking the diaper bag from John’s loose hands. Ignoring John’s still running mouth, stuttering words, Sherlock kneels, bringing himself eye-level with the toddler clinging to her father’s shin. Rosie regards him with a solemn face, and Sherlock wonders how much she understands.

“Sh’lock,” she says, and Sherlock nods to her with a small smile. 

“Hello, Rosamund,” he replies. When he holds out his hands, the toddler releases John’s jeans, takes two unsteady steps, and tumbles against Sherlock’s open palms. Sweeping the child into his arms, Sherlock stands, looking at John. John is watching them both, eyes dark and hazy, and Sherlock can’t stand to look at him a second longer.

“The usual time?” he asks, and John nods, jerky enough that Sherlock feels the undercurrent of his anxiety. Pain surges in his chest, burns and frays the ends of his nerves, sets them afire, and Sherlock looks away. He can’t look at him. He can’t.

“Thanks,” John says, and his voice is a weak breath, and Sherlock can’t bring himself to feel anything in response to the sorrow he hears there.

“No problem.” John looks away, and Sherlock closes the door in his face. He hears John retreat, footsteps fading on the pavement, leaving Sherlock with a mouthful of empty, bitter words, and a restless toddler in his arms. 


	3. Contact

The day passes with the weight of years, bearing down on John like a freight train. All day, he avoids Andrew. Avoids his phone, leaving the sound on in case Sherlock has an emergency with Rosie. 

Between patients, John dwells. Pines. Aches and digs himself deep into a hole of foreboding. When he steps out of the clinic doors, looking down the street, his feet drag, leaden. He resigns himself to returning to Baker Street, to the look on Sherlock’s face when he relieves him of Rosie. 

His phone buzzes in his pocket, and John smooths a hand over his face before fishing it out. Expecting a text from Sherlock, he is startled when Lestrade’s name flashes across the screen, his message a single word:

_Drinks?_

John hesitates. Closes his eyes, head falling back, face tight and taut and tense. He breathes air into his lungs, a man underwater, and lets it out in a cold exhale that leaves him feeling empty. 

**Need to check with Sherlock first.**

He pauses, smoothing a thumb along the edge of the phone.

 **He’s looking after Rosie.**

John sends the message, begins to slide the phone into his pocket again when it buzzes, almost instantly. He tilts the device, light reflecting off the screen. 

_Already done. He suggested it, actually. Said no rush._

John stares at the screen, at this unlikely lifeline. Is this Sherlock’s attempt at weathering the storm? A final casting out of a life preserver, as if he knows John is drowning, sinking into the waves with nowhere to go but down? 

He fiddles with the phone, bounces it against his thigh until he comes to a decision. 

**See you in fifteen.**

xxx

Sitting across from Lestrade, John wraps his hands around a cold mug of beer. He watches condensation trickle down the glass and thinks of the possibility of an ocean. When he looks up, the DI is studying him, a pensive expression on his weathered face.

“Something in my teeth?” John asks, a weak attempt at humour that doesn’t prompt a smile from either of them.

“What happened, John?” Lestrade’s voice is firm, his back stiff in the hard wooden chair, and John wants to disappear. He closes his eyes instead, if only for the illusion of being alone, and pushes the mug away. 

“I don’t want to talk about it,” he says. He thinks he forces a strong sense of finality into the words, but Lestrade is a man of the law, a man versed in reading the underlying message, the unspoken words and raging undercurrents, and he is no fool. He looks at John until John’s eyes open, and he fixes him with a hard stare. 

“‘Don’t want to’,” he repeats, slow, steady. Stable. “Or can’t?” 

John pushes a finger against the ring left by his glass on the table. “Can’t.” Lestrade’s nod is visible from his peripherals, and John tries not to think of what his face might look like.

“All right.” 

Neither of them speaks for several moments, space stretching out until taught, the din of the pub crashing over them like an oncoming tide. When it begins to feel as if the silence might rip apart, tear them into pieces, Lestrade sighs, sits forward and speaks.

“What are you going to do about it?”

John looks up, surprise on his face. It falls away, misery slipping in to take its place, and he drums his fingernails against the beer glass. 

“What makes you think there’s anything to be done?” he asks, and Lestrade’s eyes darken, mouth going tight. 

“Because you’ll lose him if there isn’t.”

John feels his stomach fall away. Words echo in his head, spoken by his father, rippling through years and years of repressed silence. They are intangible, drifting, ripping into his chest to awaken the snarling beast. His lungs constrict, the tearing of claws, and John downs the beer in a sloppy gulp, amber liquid pooling at his lips, trickling down his chin. 

“Then, I guess I’ve lost,” he says, and Lestrade’s face falls slack. He looks at John with helpless eyes, a grim understanding. When he raises a hand, John, for one stunning, crystalline moment of PTSD instinct, thinks the DI will strike him. Skin on skin, fist against face, a blow that would bring him to the ground. But Lestrade waves at the waitress for another round, and John grabs the table edge with white-knuckled fingers. 

Is this it for him? All he gets, all he’s left with? Panic and furious reverberations from the past, echoing inside his head, in tandem with the beast beneath his ribcage? 

John takes the cold beer when it arrives and drinks it without pause. The waitress hovers, uncertain, nodding when John flicks his fingers, a silent request for another. Lestrade watches him with a heavy expression, defeat in his shoulders, and John tries not to see it. 

He does, though. Of course he does. John always sees it, the disappointment he brings out in others. How could he possibly miss it, when it has been the only constant thing in his life? Here it is, the stain he paints on the faces of everyone he comes into contact with. His father, his dead wife, Sherlock, and, now, Lestrade. His own reflection, anytime he is forced to face himself in a mirror. 

One day, he will see it on his daughter’s face, too. John thinks that might be the day he finally swallows the barrel of his Sig Sauer P226, taking the misery that is John Watson out of the picture. 

John drinks his beer, and Lestrade watches, and they don’t talk about Sherlock. 

xxx

Lestrade dumps John into a cab, sending him off with a rough shake and a dismayed light in his eyes. John ignores that, ignores it all. He huddles in the backseat of the vehicle, head and vision spinning. He tries not to imagine Sherlock’s reaction to his obvious inebriation. Fails spectacularly. 

Stumbling to the door, making his way up the stairs, feeling the climb like a final push up an endless mountain, John tastes bitter smoke on his tongue and wishes for a ledge. Remembers a roof and pavement painted with blood and tries not to think about it.

 _So much wasted time. So, so much._

There’s nothing to be done, nothing at all, and when he trips into the sitting room, and Sherlock looks up from his place on the couch, John doesn’t speak. There’s nothing to be said, nothing to be done, except to fall to his knees and bury his face against Sherlock’s legs 

“John?” There is confusion, and a faint edge of panic, in Sherlock’s voice. His hands hover, tangible weight over John’s head until John lets out a low, pathetic noise. It scrapes, like gravel in his throat, and Sherlock’s fingers push through John’s hair. They wreck the military precision of the grey strands, the fell swoop of silver, and John shudders. 

“Sherlock,” he says, the name falling from his lips. “Sherlock.” It is like water, pouring from an open mouth, from drowned lungs, and John can’t stop the depthless quality of his yearning, even as it filters through like smoke. Smoke on the water, smoke in the sky, smoke in his chest, a snarling beast of fire crawling through his ribs. 

“I can’t,” he chokes. It is hard to breathe. John can’t catch his breath, and Sherlock’s fingers stroke through his hair, slow, methodical, desperate. His need bleeds from the touch, hesitant and wanting, and John feels it against his skin. “I can’t do this.” 

“Tell me why,” Sherlock murmurs, bending his long body in half, breathing warm air from his lungs against the back of John’s neck. “Tell me why you can’t.” 

John shakes his head, inaudible. Desolate and ripping apart at the seams. Sherlock shifts, pushes, slides down to the floor and gathers John into his arms. His head pillowed on Sherlock’s sturdy shoulder, John gasps against the ripping in his chest and tries not to let the hatred spill from his mouth. 

“Can’t,” he says, a whisper. A pathetic admission, from a sorry excuse for a man. He is nothing—less than human, a disgrace to the very meaning of the word. 

Sherlock holds him close, and John closes his eyes against the possibility of bliss. 

xxx

When John was a child, just a boy with skinned knees and a runny nose, his mother used to tell him stories. On the nights where John’s father raged and thundered, a veritable storm, rolling clouds and falling fists, John’s mother swept him and his sister into the back bedroom. Locked the door, wrapped them in the comforter and a false sense of safety, and spun tales. John remembers some of them, bits and pieces. 

Mostly, he remembers the words as they fell from her quivering lips. The fresh bruises rising on her face and arms as their father screamed drunken murder through the small, rundown mobile home. 

There was one story, one which stuck with John through the years of abuse. The years of screaming violence and father-borne thunderstorms, and it drifts through his head.

The story of the boy who cried wolf.

The story wasn’t long, but John forgot much of it over the years. Laying on the floor of 221B, his head in Sherlock’s lap, sunlight painting gold across the red carpet and his closed eyelids, John remembers. Just bits and pieces. Flashes of colour and snatches of words.

It was a simple story, one with a powerful lesson, a dark ending. A story of a child who never learned real fear until it was too late. Learned when no one would help him, and he was devoured by the beast. John’s own beast roars, keens inside his chest, and he cries wolf into Sherlock’s lap. Cries wolf, begs safety, repeats himself hoarse. 

John doesn’t want to be devoured by the beast, and he doesn’t want to learn the lesson too late. His eyes open, finding Sherlock’s faded face above his.

“John,” Sherlock says, John’s name dropping from his lips. It is an offering. An open hand, reaching out with wounded hope. 

For once in his life, John reaches back. 

“Sherlock.” His hands rise, gripping in dark curls. “I’m sorry.” A dark shadow touches the detective’s eyes, fades their silver colour to slate, but John moves past it. He shifts up, pulls Sherlock down, presses a light kiss to the corner of his mouth.

Sherlock goes stiff and still, and John’s chest is caving in, collapsing, he is collapsing, because he got it wrong, _so, so wrong_. But then Sherlock is kissing him full on the lips, grabbing John to his chest, hands wild, wandering, touching wherever they can reach. His fingers move over John’s face, his neck, his shoulders and back again, painting patterns of fire over John’s skin, through his clothes. 

His father’s voice rises in his head, the edge of a thunderstorm. Andrew’s words follow. All the looks and judgements and hateful whispers swirl behind John’s eyes, and he chokes back a mouthful of regret, protests and stammered denials blocking his throat. The noise in his head threatens to deafen, and John tugs at Sherlock’s arm, pleading with teeth and tongue.

He can’t. He _can’t._

Sherlock makes a sound, low in his throat, a resonant hum of fraught need. It drowns out all the rest. Submerges John in a different ocean altogether. He no longer feels like he’s drowning, sinking like a stone. Instead, he feels buoyant, exultant, lifted upon gentle waves. 

Sherlock’s tongue parts his lips, and John tastes redemption. 


End file.
